The investment manager is a founding partner in Essentia’s new AI Partner Program (AIPP), which will provide behavioural analytics and decision-making insights for investment professionals.

Baillie Gifford headquarterd in Edinburgh has 1,600 staff and around £200bn of assets under management. It also has offices in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, Toronto, and Zurich.

In a statement Essentia said: “Every serious asset manager maintains an AI stack: large language models and agents processing and interpreting the firm’s proprietary and third-party data.”

“That data is generally rich in general market and securities performance information, but very little of it describes the one thing a firm has full ownership of: the quality of its investment decision-making.

“Essentia Data-Out fills that gap. It delivers Essentia’s proprietary behavioral analytics, measures of skill and decision-making at the portfolio manager, team and firm level, into a firm’s own cloud data environment through a secure Snowflake data share, where it can enrich the firm’s own models, agents and oversight tools.

“Essentia Data-Out is grounded in Essentia’s proprietary Behavioral Alpha methodology, which is peer-reviewed and has been road-tested and refined over more than a decade with hundreds of top equity portfolio managers around the world.

“As one of the founding members of Essentia’s AI Partner Program, Baillie Gifford, an existing Essentia client, receives early access to each new EDO release and helps define the EDO roadmap, including which Essentia metrics and analyses are developed next.”

Essentia Analytics chief executive Clare Flynn Levy said: “Your AI is only as good as the data it can consume. Firms are feeding their AI stacks every kind of market and fundamental data, but almost none of them are including the one thing they are ultimately paid for: the quality of their own decisions.

“Essentia Data-Out makes that behavioral intelligence a native part of the stack. Now, a portfolio manager pondering a decision will be able to ask their AI and get a robust and reliable response from Essentia about how that decision maps to the patterns we’ve detected in their past behavior.”

James Taylor, head of investment analytics at Baillie Gifford, said: “As long-term active investors, we are always looking for ways to improve the quality of our investment decision-making.

“We work with partners like Essentia to bring in distinctive data and research alongside our proprietary analysis, so that we can help our investors to understand their decisions from a robust, evidence-based perspective.

“This helps us to systematically learn from the decisions we make, continuously improve our investment process and, ultimately, support our aim of delivering better long-term outcomes for our clients.“